LinkedIn Revamps Design, Adds Status Updates
Thursday morning LinkedIn will roll out a new site-wide design featuring a tab-less header and a persistent left column with personal, account-related options.
LinkedIn is also adding status updates with which users can broadcast their current activities (professional or otherwise) to their connections and/or networks.
Just as when the company added portraits, these updates feel like an attempt to mimic Facebook. The new design bestows upon LinkedIn a similar layout to Facebook’s, with the page divided into a header, a thin left column, and a wide right one. Facebook has also had featured status updates for quite some time.
There are differences, of course, between the two. LinkedIn has decided to place a box at the bottom of the left column that continually reminds you how many connections you have, how many people have recently joined your network, what your status is, and more. The homepage will also have modules that you’ll be able to drag around to reorder.
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LinkedIn Goes Mobile—Finally
Six months after Facebook came out with a version of its social network for the iPhone, LinkedIn is finally coming around to releasing a mobile version of its own.
It is live now. Just go to http://m.linkedin.com/ on any mobile browser. Of course, if you have an iPhone, you will see a version optimized just for that device.
This isn’t exactly what we had in mind when we noted there is still an opportunity to create a kick-ass mobile social network.
But the basic functionality is all there. You can look up people’’s profiles, invite people into your network, and see updates from your contacts. More fully-featured, downloadable mobile apps geared to specific phones may be coming in the future.
Even limited mobile browser accessibility should help LinkedIn keep its members happy. The regular Website has been on a tear lately, nearly tripling in unique visitors over the past year in the U.S., to 3.6 million in January 2008, according to comScore.
No signs of social networking fatigue there.
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YouPorn, We’re Coming Up Behind You
Now that I have your attention, Compete has released a list of the fastest-growing (and fastest-declining) sites of 2007. Some of the fastest growers include Veoh, LinkedIn, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Six Apart, and WordPress. Some of the notable sinkers are Bolt, Xanga, Netscape, and Autobytel.
TechCrunch has the distinct honor of taking the No. 5 spot in the fastest-growing list, right behind YouPorn and in front of DateHookup. I am not exactly sure what to make of that. I guess Compete thinks we’re hot.
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LinkedIn Joins The DataPortability Work Group
Joining the cavalcade of companies jumping on the open data bandwagon, LinkedIn has now joined Facebook, Google, Plaxo (announcement here) in joining the DataPortability Work Group.
LinkedIn has worked hard to become open since announcing their own open platform in June 2007 in response to Facebook, then becoming an initial OpenSocial launch partner in October 2007.
I spoke to the DataPortability Work Group head Chris Saad prior to the announcement and he told me that he was happy to see another leading social networking site join the group. Since the big announcement Tuesday he’s had a number of other approaches from leading sites to join the group, companies he wouldn’t name to me who might join in the coming days. It was only January 6 when we wrote the words “ultimately supporting open access to data is a positive thing…as social networking further matures in 2008, open access is a cause that may well find favor.” Little did we know then that there would be an almighty rush of companies signing up to work for open standards and data portability with the next four days. As much as it pains me on some levels to say this, thanks Robert Scoble, your Gandhi-esque resistance was the tipping point.
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LinkedIn API and New Homepage Drawing Near
LinkedIn, the social network for professionals, is trying to establish itself as a better destination with a stronger presence on the web.
As a better destination, LinkedIn would experience higher levels of user engagement and more page views, which in turn would translate into greater advertising revenue. With a stronger presence, the site would grab mind share away from rising competitor Facebook, which has already become a household name for many.
A new homepage, with a focus on providing users with reasons to return more often, is under development and meant to turn LinkedIn into a better destination. A “beta” version of this homepage will go live for a subset of LinkedIn users this Monday. The three homepage components meant to entice users back to the site include on-site messaging, news articles from around the web, and “network updates” (i.e. a news feed). On-site messaging is not new but will now enjoy prime real estate on the homepage, with the inbox sitting on the top of everything else. The news feed, which will be given third greatest prominence, will display the network activity of people in your network.
Most notable is a new feature, discovered by Erick last week, that will display headlines from around the web which may be of professional interest to you. Unlike the early version of this system that Erick stumbled upon, the most recent iteration of LinkedIn’s news aggregator - the one featured on this beta homepage - will not require any manual training. It will rely on its own algorithms to automatically determine what you may be interested in reading, in part using the history of what other people in your network have read to make its selection (LinkedIn is not disclosing what service it actually uses to aggregate all the headlines in the first place). News articles will be filterable by topics such as: most read, company, competitors, and industry.
More interesting to me is LinkedIn’s attempt to build a stronger presence on the web by providing an API, previously disclosed but until now without any real details available. There’s still not a lot of information, but the company has disclosed that it is actively working with select group of partners to develop applications with the new API. BusinessWeek, the only known partner, will implement a few features using LinkedIn’s API, as shown in the screenshot to the right. The API will basically allow BusinessWeek to draw from the information in users’ profiles and associate it with the content in its articles. One way to do this will be to display, via a popup, how many people in a company are directly connected to a user or in the extended network or geographical region of a user.
LinkedIn hasn’t disclosed exactly when the API will be readily available but the company does say that the API will eventually be accessible to any and all developers sometime in the next year. The API will provide access to information in profiles, connections, search, network updates, and the “company insider” (its news article service).
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LinkedIn Turns On Its Own News Feeds (in Beta)
Now that we are all having second thoughts about Facebook, maybe it is time to start logging in to LinkedIn again. I did that for the first time in a few weeks and was surprised to find a new widget on the lower right hand side of my home page called “News for You (Beta).” It appears to be a news feed informed by my profile, perhaps by the companies I’ve worked for.
The LinkedIn news widget has four headlines that link out to the original stories, and the whole thing is “powered by Google.” (Not clear if it is Google News or something else.)
This really is a beta because there is no way to click for more headlines, and the stories seem to be associated with my former employer Business 2.0, even though I’ve updated my profile to list TechCrunch as my current employer. The four headlines LinkedIn picked are one about SAP (boring), one about Salesforce.com (newsy), one about tech conferences (got me pegged on that one), and one about Facebook (right company, wrong story—no mention of the Beacon controversy). The four stories are all from trade publications or newspapers. No blogs. I am not super-impressed.
But maybe you have to train it to make it relevant. Above the widget is another box that says “Help build “News for you”: Click here to help LinkedIn build a custom news feed for you and your colleagues at Business 2.0.” When I click on that, it takes me to another page where I can enter company names and topics that I want news about. I type in a few names and keywords, and go back to my home page. Still the same headlines. Maybe this thing really isn’t turned on yet.
But customized news feeds based on the company or industry you work for could help motivate business types to check in to LinkedIn more often. My suggestion: Give members the option to choose their favorite news sources (including blogs) when they are training the application. Then favor those sources in the feed, but still surface stories from elsewhere below. That way you’d get both self-directed targeting and serendipity.
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Visible Path Sees Its Way To An Acquisition
Corporate social networking application Visible Path is set for an acquisition soon. The term sheet has been signed and the acquirer, says the company, is a “multi-billion dollar international company with established sales and technology operations.” No word on the terms of the deal, but a worthwhile exit price would be high considering the $22.7 million already invested in the firm.
Visible Path differs from other business social networks like LinkedIn or Xing, by creating your social network out of your email inbox. The service is based on an Outlook plug-in that impressed us earlier because your connections are based on the frequency of your real interactions and not random friending or pokes. These relationships are mapped online and make up a directory of people you can search through by skill or relationship. It’s a useful feature that I imagine a service like the “email utility” Xobni implementing.
Visible Path never saw as great a level of adoption as LinkedIn, which launched around the same time and has effectively cinched the U.S. corporate social networking scene. Maybe their new partner will give them some much needed exposure.
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News Corp May Have Found God, But Not LinkedIn
News Corp has acquired New York based religious community site Beliefnet, according to a report at FishbowlNY.
Beliefnet was founded in 1999 and provides a service that offers commentary and community discussion on various religious beliefs. The company has a checkered history, having declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy in April 2002, then restructuring and emerging from bankruptcy in October the same year. According to earlier reports, around 70% of the sites traffic is related to Christian interests, with around 70% of users being females, and the most popular age group being 35 to 45. Beliefnet raised $7 million from Softbank Capital in 2005.
Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.
In related news, a “source fimilar with the matter” has told Reuters that News Corp is not in negotiations to buy LinkedIn, rumors of which first surfaced on TechCrunch UK in November. The source claimed that News Corp was in talks with LinkedIn, but the two companies had been discussing future partnerships, not a takeover. With the Dow Jones (Wall Street Journal) acquisition being finalized a partnership between News Corp and LinkedIn would make a lot of sense; the premium business sites from Dow Jones provide a high-wealth business focused demographic that would sit well with LinkedIn’s business networking product.
Update: sources at Fox Interactive are saying they know nothing about the deal; this isn’t to say that its not happening but it is a little strange.
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News Corp Looking To Buy LinkedIn
Newscorp is said to be talks to buy business social networking service LinkedIn, according to TechCrunch UK. Full story here.
Mountain View based LinkedIn has appox. 12 million users and has taken $27.5 million over 3 rounds from investors including Sequoia, Greylock and Bessemer Venture Partners. The site has been faced with the rise of Facebook as an alternative business networking site, although as TechCrunch commenter’s enjoy pointing out: it’s not the same. LinkedIn is also an OpenSocial partner with Google.
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News Corp May Be Looking To Buy LinkedIn
Newscorp is said to be talks to buy business social networking service LinkedIn, according to TechCrunch UK. Full story here.
Mountain View based LinkedIn has approx. 12 million users and has taken $27.5 million over 3 rounds from investors including Sequoia, Greylock and Bessemer Venture Partners. The site has been faced with the rise of Facebook as an alternative business networking site, although as TechCrunch commenter’s enjoy pointing out: it’s not the same. LinkedIn is also an OpenSocial partner with Google.
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